1) The 'oddity' of the AIPAC setting. After my dispatch yesterday on Barack Obama's appearance at AIPAC, I have received several notes in the following vein:

[quoting me] "I can't think of another situation where an American president, speaking to an American audience on American soil, would find it necessary or dignified to plead his bona fides in a similar way. "

You write a thoughtful piece, but that line made me do a double take... politicians, especially when campaigning, spend approximately 95% of their time pleading with American audiences, in America, of their "bona fides" for office - and more specifically, if they are talking to farmers, they exaggerate/make-up whatever they have done to please farmers, etc etc.

The uncomfortable counter question I have for you is, in this specific instance - why the incredulity at a politician describing his support of an issue that pertains to the constituent group he is addressing? What is different about this case than with other constituencies and what they find important? I won't answer the question behind these questions, because frankly I don't believe it applies to you, but I did want to point out the awkward territory you (likely accidentally) might have walked into.

I appreciate the delicacy with which the reader raises an indelicate issue -- whether it's anti-Semitic to note the "oddity" of the AIPAC appearances by U.S. politicians. Let me be respectfully precise in reply.

Of course politicians aspiring to any office, including the presidency, plead for support from any number of groups. Even sitting presidents, with all their augustness and power, do something similar, especially at re-election time. Barack Obama would be crazy not to remind everyone in Michigan how he pushed for the auto-bailout bill -- or not to tell an AARP convention or a university crowd, respectively, about what he has done on Social Security and student-loan programs. I have seen Bill Clinton in front of black organizations, arguing that he had been their dependable tribune.

What I found odd about the AIPAC performance is that an American president was expected to make similar pleas about his reliability in support of another country's government. Let's imagine that Barack Obama's next big speech is to the National Council of La Raza. We would expect him to remind the crowd what he has done on immigration and affirmative-action issues, and to contrast that with the Republicans. We would not expect him to say that he has stood with the government of Mexico "every single time." Before a Korean-American group, we would expect him to talk about what he has done for peace on the Korean peninsula, for trade agreements, against the North Korean threat, and so on. We would never hear him say that his policies have been indistinguishable from the Republic of Korea's. So on down a list of foreign states.

My premise is that sovereign nations are sometimes bound by formal alliances (as the US is with its NATO partners, but is not with Israel), and other times by values, ethnicity, heritage, interests, and ideals (a combination of which usually binds the U.S. to Israel, and to many other states). But their interests are not identical -- a point that is obvious, and that Prime Minister Netanyahu himself made in his latest AIPAC speech. Therefore to me it seems undignified to put an American president in a setting where he is expected to proclaim "every single time" adherence to the interests and policies of another state. That is what I was remarking, and I should have taken the time to spell that out the first time. Moreover: whether or not it is undignified and objectionable, at a minimum it is odd. If anyone has examples of comparable situations, in which an American president is expected to make an "every single time" pledge about a foreign state, I will gladly share them.

2) 'Living with' a nuclear Iran. I mentioned yesterday Paul Pillar's Washington Monthly piece on what it would mean to coexist with a nuclear-capable Iran. Here is another worth reading, by Suzanne Maloney, from the American Prospect.

3) Not really a 'ritual.' A reader with experience both with AIPAC and its modern alternative, J Street, writes:

First, from my semi-trained eye AIPAC seems to be overextending itself this year. The conference is too large, the congressional ask is too aggressive, and the public attacks on the credibility of the President are too brazen. I've noticed that AIPAC is making serious headlines in the mainstream press, which I think is going to hurt them. It's going to be a lot harder to fight allegations that they are too powerful and exercise too much pull in Congress going forward from here.

I disagree, though, with your use of "ritual." If anything this year's AIPAC confab is breaking from much of the usual ritual. That's mostly due to its own rightward drift, and the shameless bellicosity of the ruling Israeli coalition and the American GOP. The Likud Knesset has lashed itself to the mast of the worldwide anti-Iran cause. I won't deny that AIPAC is too effective for its own good, but on balance this year's gathering is subject to, not creating, political reality.

4) 'Learning' from history. After the jump, a note on whether we are in danger of over-learning the "lessons" of the Iraq war.

A reader on the West Coast writes:

I agree with most
of what you've said. But the comments you cited, most notably Eugene
Rostow's, illustrate an all-too-common fallacy of the reasoning of
so-called experts in such situations: "learning" from the unsound
reasoning of an earlier crisis to make "better" policy choices this time
around.

The hawks of the Vietnam era had "learned" from Chamberlain's
appeasement of Hitler, followed by Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe
and the "Who Lost China" accusations, that we must be prepared to
intervene anywhere to prevent the fall of the dominoes everywhere. As
our local Oregon "hawk," Democratic Congressman Bob Duncan (who narrowly
lost a Senate race to Mark Hatfield in 1966 and then challenged Wayne
Morse unsuccessfully in 1968), said in 1966: "I'd rather fight them on
the banks of the Mekong than in the rye grass along the Columbia."
Rostow, Dulles, Bundy, and the rest had learned a lesson from their
recent past , but then applied it indiscriminately to whatever
international crisis came along thereafter.

As you point out,
our generation has "learned" that the fall of Vietnam didn't lead to a
blowup in Korea. Other than Laos and Cambodia, the "dominoes" did not
fall. We've also learned that a preemptive strike against Iraq doesn't
guarantee the destruction of caches of nuclear weapons when those
weapons don't exist. But should we conclude that neither the US nor
Israel is justified in a preemptive attack against Iran, or would we be
making a conversely groundless historical extrapolation in Iran as the
Rostows made in Vietnam in the 1960s?

I would advocate that we
must recognize the differences between the present controversy and the
precedents. I see several critical differences between Iraq/Vietnam (in
which our intervention was founded upon a false premise) and Iran, in
which the issues are not necessarily the same: 1) Iran appears
committed, not only to disputing Israel's legitimacy, but to eradicating
Israel as a state altogether; 2) Iran's development of nuclear
capability threatens the stability of the Middle East in a variety of
other ways, such as intimidating Saudi Arabia and other pro-Western
countries in the region. If Iran rejects the internationally-recognized
principles of nuclear nonproliferation and becomes a nuclear state,
what are the consequences of other countries in the region, in addition
to Israel, following suit? 3) Our choice in Iran may not be merely
between peace and war, but whether we let Israel go it alone, or we
support them. Israel's calculation is different from ours, both because
of its proximity to Iran and because, given the history of the Jewish
people, the Israeli government can never again risk their
extermination. Given those realities, are we better off with the risks
of a preemptive attack to try to maintain a non-nuclear Middle East, or
the risks of a Middle East in which the Saudis, Egyptians, Iran, Israel,
the Pakistanis, and perhaps Hamas, Hezbollah and others, have nuclear
capability?

I'm not advocating the neo-con approach, nor of
talking up a war. But I think Obama's measured approach rightly
recognizes that the risks here are very serious, and that "existential"
risk to Israel may be more real than we care to admit. The real
problem, as with Iraq, is that it's difficult to have a serious public
debate about the issue when we don't know what we don't know. We won't
know if our intelligence sources, or Israel's are privy to information
that would make a decisive difference in what we should do. As with
Iraq, we'll only find out after the fact, whether we made the right
choice.

For now I'll just say: the wonderful book Thinking in Time, by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, is worth reading for what it says about this exact question, of whether it is possible to "learn" useful "lessons" from history.__Housekeeping note: odd posting times, by US standards, because I am in Australia.

About the Author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.